“What do you mean? I thought your parents…” My words trailed off, tangling uselessly in my throat.
She met my eyes then, her gaze full of sorrow, full of weight. Full of something she had been carrying her entire life. Concern etched every line of her face as though she knew exactly what the next words would do to me.
“My mother,” she said, each word deliberate, heavy, unshakable. “Your grandmother… is the High Priestess of Shadowick.”
The ground tilted.
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. The courtyard spun, the stars blurred, and all I could hear was the echo of her words, pounding in my skull like a second heartbeat.
The High Priestess of Shadowick.
Not Elira. Not Stonewick.
Shadowick.
My blood went cold, even as the night air stayed warm. The world shrank to her face, her words, the implication unfurling like a shadow across my chest.
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.
Keegan’s arm tightened around me instinctively, his eyes filled with concern, searching my face as though he could anchor me by sheer will. His mother’s eyes narrowed, watching. My dad’s hand squeezed my mom’s tighter, a silent show of solidarity, even as the revelation shattered everything I thought I knew.
The High Priestess of Shadowick. My grandmother.
That made me…
My throat burned. My heart thundered.
What did that make me?
What did that mean for Stonewick?
What did that mean for everything I had fought for, everything Grandma Elira had died to protect?
I stared at my mother, searching her face for a sign of denial, a smile, or some indication that this was just another one of her eccentric barbs, the kind meant to make me roll my eyes.
But her eyes were serious, weighted, tired.
She wasn’t lying.
And the world would never be the same again.
The words echoed in my skull until I thought they might crack me open.
The courtyard blurred at the edges, my vision tilting and swaying as though the people around me were moving, pacing, whispering, rearranging themselves, when in truth, everyone was exactly where they had been. Students slumped on the steps. Teachers held one another upright. My parents sat side by side, closer than I had ever seen them. And Keegan’s arm stayed firm around my shoulders, grounding me even as the world spun out from under my feet.
I turned to him, searching his face, my voice breaking into the silence. “Did you know?”
His eyes widened, shock carved into every line of his face. He shook his head, sharp and certain. “I had no idea.”
The air left my lungs in a rush. My stomach gnawed with a hollow ache. I didn’t understand what it meant for Stonewick, for my place here, for Gideon.
Gideon.
Is that why he always told me I didn’t belong in Stonewick? Had he known I was tied to Shadowick all along? Had he known I had a different place…one he was trying to warn me of even as he fell further into darkness?
And Luna. Her family never rooted here; they always hovered at the edges. She’d probably been a spy all along. The missing puzzle piece had been under our noses, knitting shawls.
I looked at my family, my father’s clenched jaw, my mother’s shadowed eyes, Keegan’s mother standing proud despite her grief, and then at Keegan himself, the witches, the fae, the shifters who had all bled tonight for Stonewick.
